1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to personal digital assistants and, more particularly, to processing handwritten input using a handwriting recognition engine.
2. Background Description
The current limitations of most Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), especially in the areas of processing power and storage, prohibit them from effectively utilizing natural human handwriting as a means of input. In order to provide good results, handwriting recognition engines need a significant amount of processing power and storage to perform their job. Several technologies, such as the one upon which the Apple Newton PDA is based, have attempted to integrate handwriting recognition engines into PDAs, but their usability has been limited and has come at great monetary cost. Other PDAs have taken a different approach to scripted user input, namely the user of discrete meta-language. By carefully designing the meta-language, and forcing the user to input it into a small, well-defined area on the device, accuracy rates for interpretation can be significantly increased while keeping the computation costs low. However, this type of input system is unnatural to use and requires that the user be trained on the system.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a process for a personal data assistant device which effectively uses human handwriting as a means of input.
By taking advantage of the fact that a significant portion of the data which is entered into a PDA is not time-critical (i.e., it does not require a millisecond response) and can, therefore, remain in handwritten form for some period of time, we can choose to transmit the recorded information from the user""s input to an external device for processing and bypass the limitations which exist for this type of interpretation on the PDA itself. After the translation occurs, the data can be passed back to the PDA for storage and/or processing within an application on the PDA.
When using the PDA, the user would enter notes on the pad either free form or in an application specific form. The handwritten data collected by the PDA may then be transferred to a recognition engine. This recognition engine may be remote and connected via wireless modem. The transfer may be done in real time or later.